Tag Archive for 'Australian culture'

The Australian’s series on the left

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 3 weeks ago
in Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, History, Media, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 72 Comments

On Saturday, I penned some thoughts on the series in The Australian on the Australian left, riffing off the first article by Tim Soutphommasane.

Among other things, I queried the practice of addressing a discourse about left politics to the presumed centres of power, describing those who do that sort of thing as “court philosophers”. I also suggested that labourism might be a better place to look for an explanation of how the left has shaped Australian society and politics than social democracy.

Guy Rundle has taken up the torch, reviewing the full series of articles in today’s Crikey, and going where none of the “left thinkers” dared to tread – propounding an “idea of what the left’s basic principles are or should be, and what sort of positive programme, rather than reactive policy, they should propose.”

Read his piece (reproduced with permission) over the fold. Continue reading ‘The Australian’s series on the left’

Rundle: Greens should drop watermelon party

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Activism, Australiana, Culture, Environment, Politics and Sociology
. 153 Comments

In today’s Crikey, Guy Rundle segues from the latest round of “Nats should leave the Coalition” talk (refracted, this time, if The Australian is to be believed, predictably through the Malcolm Turnbull leadership prism) to a consideration of the impact of environmental crisis on rural voters.

It’s always been the case that rural or farmers’ parties have had a chance of survival in modern Western polities precisely because there are cultural differences which are much more deep seated than often grasped between rural and urban dwellers. In many ways, to live rurally is still to partake in the legacies of a culture which literally goes back to a time immemorial – one closely tied to the rhythms of time, nature and the fruits of the land. There’s a different time sense, and a different set of values, based not just on a different core factor of production, but on a culture where nature is not so distinct.

For us, in the cities, and in Australia that’s most of us, we really do live in a quite distinct world where things like our food supply are far more abstract and thus far less prominent concerns (that is, they’re naturalised in a different sense of the term – backgrounded, rendered relatively invisible and subject to a routinisation which doesn’t prompt reflection).

Hence the sort of validity – though sometimes the motives are suspect – of identification claims made by farmers with Indigenous custodianship (and the very closeness of some cultural motifs leads to an unreasonable and exaggerated fear of the Other).

Rundle’s argument is that the Nats can get serious by taking their constituents’ interweaving with the environment seriously. But he also suggests that the Greens’ ties to a heap of social stands aren’t necessary, nor necessarily fruitful for them. I’m not sure if Rundle knows that there are some Greens in Queensland who certainly don’t perceive themselves as on the left. I myself have never been convinced that there’s a logical link between ecological and left wing politics, speaking as an advocate of left wing politics.

Continue reading ‘Rundle: Greens should drop watermelon party’

Guest post by Marcus Westbury: The culture of hard times

Published
by
Guest Poster
1 year, 1 month ago
in Culture, Economics, Melbourne and Sociology
. 17 Comments

Cross-posted from Marcus’ blog.

From my small air conditioned bubble in a sweltering Melbourne the abstract economic gloom of stock shocks and far away corporate collapses is getting less and less abstract with each passing day. Anecdotal reports of jobs drying up, businesses closing, incomes evaporating and people fast becoming un or underemployed are mounting around me.

It is probably a good time to remind myself just how much of the culture that I find interesting is the product not of the big budget top end of town but of the unique possibilities of the down side of the economic cycle. It seems obvious to me that in cultural policy – as with almost everything else – changing times call for changing approaches.

Yet the impending new realities have not gained much traction in our cultural debates. Over the last few months, I’ve been travelling up and down the east coast and dealing with arts agencies and organisations at various levels. I’ve been a little surprised at how little recognition there is that cultural policy – like most forms of government policy – can and must adapt and respond to economic conditions.

Each phase in the economic cycle creates a different set of cultural possibilites and problems.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Marcus Westbury: The culture of hard times’

The summer of Australian culture, New Matilda (and new media) style

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Activism, Australiana, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Government, Media, Policy, Sociology and The Web
. 13 Comments

Image of the State Library of Victoria from avlxyz at flickr reproduced under a creative commons licence.

One thing I used to notice when I used to buy newspapers was that around this time of year “culture” steps out of the weekend review pages and takes pride of place as “holiday reading”. Short stories are serialised, the state of art forms and cultural genres worried about, and reviews abound. And not just on Saturday and Sunday.

2008 saw, in my view, a number of tipping points in the mediascape (and I’ll have more to say about this in a later post). For instance, according to the Pew Centre, the net overtook papers for the first time in the United States as a source of news. The current counter to the “death of the newspaper” narrative from some of the editorial and journo crew is a claim that everyone suffers if folks don’t have a comprehensive perspective on what’s going on, limiting themselves to following fields of niche interest. Margaret Simons has something to say about this theme at Content Makers, riffing off a piece by Sally Young at Inside Story. Now, I strongly doubt that there were ever people who read the paper cover to cover as a matter of civic duty. [Young doesn't make that claim, but it's implied in some of the less nuanced arguments from folks in the news biz.] Indeed, the division of newspapers into sections, and the usual relegation of matters cultural to the weekend in itself exemplifies the fact that judgements – highly normative (and often gendered) ones – are being made about what people should read. We’re to assume that serious stuff – politics and crime – occupies the minds of serious people, until they get to take a Christmas/New Year timeout. I’m actually not sure these people exist, and the ideal type of the reader imagined in the mind of the all knowing editor and publisher is one of the big problems with print media.

Anyway, all this is a bit of an introduction to a feature that New Matilda has been running over the last little while – a focus on Australian culture. There’s all sorts of interesting reading – Jason Wilson and Melissa Gregg on why we can thank John Howard for Underbelly, Judith White on museums and galleries, Robert Miller on the state of the film industry, Sue Turnbull on the state of Australian television, David Musgrave on Australian’s relationship to poets and poetry, John Hunter on small presses and independent publishers and Lynden Barber with the obligatory Baz Luhrmann review. All are well worth a read.

Returning to my theme, though, as part of the “State of the Cultural Nation” series, Barry Saunders writes on new media and a “surge” in democracy and citizen journalism:

Continue reading ‘The summer of Australian culture, New Matilda (and new media) style’

Advance Australia Fair?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 6 months ago
in Anzac Day, Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, History, Indigenous, Markets, Media, Nationalism, Philosophy and Politics
. 23 Comments

At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.

One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:

A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world – would it deserve to exist?

In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state – a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy – in quite different ways – want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship – while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.

Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Continue reading ‘Advance Australia Fair?’